Judge Richard Caretti’s ex-wife is appealing a judge’s denial of her $9,000 in her legal fees for her dispute with Caretti over an old child-support payment.

Lori Conway wants a review of Judge Mark Switalski’s ruling against her request for attorney and court costs associated with recovering a $1,750 child support payment from August 2012. Caretti issued the check on time, but Conway says she didn’t have it or didn’t know she had it. She discovered the check last October.

Switalski early this month granted Conway the support payment but in not awarding costs said, “There’s two pretty decent arguments” and that Caretti’s conduct wasn’t “unreasonable.”

The transcript of the Jan. 6 hearing in Macomb County Circuit Court in Mount Clemens reveals the acrimonious nature of the dispute through remarks by Caretti and Conway’s attorney, Renee Gucciardo.

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Gucciardo contends Caretti should pay the legal fees because he should have re-issued the support payment after he learned the check wasn’t cashed and the money returned to his account. As a judge he “is held to a higher standard,” she said.

The payment was part of a child-support deal from the 2011 divorce and ended in July with Caretti abandoning his parental rights of two of his children.

“Michigan law does not permit retroactive modification of past-due child support,” Gucciardo says in the “docketing statement” filed Jan. 26 with the appeals court.

Switalski said, however, it can be “waived” by a party.

Gucciardo called Caretti’s failure to pay the child support “unconscionable.”

“He has engaged in legal shenanigans, which has caused my client to incur substantial fees and attorney fees just trying to collect was court ordered,” Gucciardo said.

Caretti, representing himself in court, countered, “Her request for attorney fees is shocking …. The only reason is an effort to discredit and try to embarrass me.”

Caretti noted that Lori Conway changed her story. She first claimed she found the check in a drawer and later said she found it in her mailbox, presumably placed there by a neighbor.

The longtime circuit judge released his parental rights of his two teenage daughters after they were involved in an incident a year ago in which Caretti’s girlfriend, Brenda Conway, was arrested for drunken driving with two minors in the vehicle in the Franklin driveway of Lori Conway’s home, following a Macomb Township wedding reception for a Caretti relative. She was sentenced in December to two years probation by Judge Debra Nance of 46th District Court in Southfield.